Our Manifestos

Now For The Tricky Bit

I started Collaborate Marketing five years ago when I became interested in blogs and the effects of consumers grabbing hold of chunks of the media world that had previously been run exclusively by large profitable MegaMediaCorps. For a while it seemed that the new digital media wave was going to blow away the old guard. Instead the media soup’s just become thicker, as everything that can be digitised has been sucked online, constantly adding exotic seasoning to an IP-flavoured broth. For media and marketing professionals, the world has gone from being a refined a
la carte menu of traditional TV and radio fare to a bewildering tapas
selection that’s refreshed on a weekly basis. Indeed, so flexible has the technology become, that some of the new dishes in the networked media world can seem quite bizarre. The plug-and-play web means a smart hacker can fuse pot plants into his own global energy management system; people can pay real money to have their virtual dogs neutered; others can leave Hansel-and-Gretel style music trails behind them; a social network of people can share credit card purchases; the ‘cloud’ promises mind-boggling opportunities to suck up information about the world.
Now that anything seems possible technically, it’s tempting to think that the hard work has been done. However, the really tricky part is yet to come. The next stage is for people to learn how to use all this new wizardry, which can be difficult, particularly when it means unfamiliar types of online collaboration.
While hackers and open source tinkerers like nothing more than linking technical systems or pooling data swamps, most of the world see the walls around them as comforting and reassuring. Not just inconvenient barriers that need to be smashed down to accelerate disruption.
A common thread of all my consulting work over the last year has been to try and help groups brought together by networked media to operate effectively. Sometimes these groups are thrilled by the idea of new opportunities to collaborate together. Sometimes they are appalled at the prospect. More often they are a little bit of both.
The challenges raised when people are flung together on networked media platforms are devilish and diverse. For consumers (aka people), sharing the same online neighbourhoods for the first time can feel wonderfully liberating at best, but chaotic at worst. For professionals in large organisations, the requirement to take the best of the old and mix it with the best of the new can seem like mixing fine wine with Red Bull. For corporations the opportunity to work across traditional sectors is all too easy to confuse with the appearance of new competitors that need to be crushed.
We’ve rewired the marketing and media world. Now we need to reinvent the way we work together.